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Research

At root, my research interests lie in exploring ideas of artistic community and collaborative practice.

I am particularly interested in how such ideas have been culturally framed across a range of media and contexts (e.g. manifestos, collaboratively produced artworks, autobiographies, oral accounts, representations in fiction). I’m also interested in how they sit in relation to more dominant cultural narratives of community.

At the moment I am filtering these interests through a number of curatorial and practice-based projects in Bloomsbury, where I work. An area synonymous with ideas of artistic community (from the Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood to the Bloomsbury Set, the Vorticists to the Independent Group) Bloomsbury is also a suggestive crucible in which to interrogate the conditions of contemporary collaborative practice. A lot of my work tries in various ways to initiate experiments in collaborative community, on different scales.

Under the umbrella of Being Human festival I’ve curated numerous events and activities which draw directly on my research into the history of Bloomsbury. An example is ‘The Ministry of Hope and Fear’ (with Dr Naomi Paxton), a programme of events and art commissions at Senate House in 2016.

Recently I have been working (with Dr Elizabeth Dearnley) on ‘The Secret Diary of Bloomsbury’ an experiment in participatory mass diary writing at locations across WC1E.